With funding for the Saltend ore earth separation facility near Hull at an advanced stage, Pensana has established a direct relationship with the key Japanese magnet manufacturers and has entered into an MOU for 25% of Saltend’s annual production. It has ongoing discussions with Japanese trading houses with direct access to the Japanese automotive sector.
In an update on financing and project development, the company says terms have been agreed with a major European wind turbine OEM and the Company has been shortlisted to supply major US and European automotive OEMs, for what it says is the increasingly attractive point of differentiation for an independently validated sustainable product from the UK.
Located in the Saltend Chemical Park in the Humber Freeport, Saltend will be the world’s first rare earth processing hub, capable of processing third party feedstock imported from around the world. A number of discussions are underway with potential third-party feedstock suppliers for access to uncommitted processing capacity at Saltend.
The Company has partnered with the adjacent Yorkshire Energy Park for a private wire connection to offshore wind battery storage under which it will have access to 4 MW rising to 10 MW of low carbon electricity for ten years and together with Longonjo’s ten-year low-cost supply of hydro-electric power the Company is able to demonstrate that it can supply ultra-low embedded carbon products from mine to customer.
A direct example of this is Pensana’s partnership with Polestar to create the first truly climate-neutral car by 2030. The scope of the Polestar 0 project is to identify and eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions from the extraction of raw materials to when the car is delivered to the customer and onwards to the end of vehicle life.
Pensana and Equinor are studying the use of low carbon hydrogen produced from Equinor’s flagship 600MW low-carbon hydrogen production plant with carbon capture, Hydrogen to Humber (H2H) at Saltend, to recycle the seven tonnes of rare earth permanent magnets in the nacelles of wind turbines currently being installed in the 3.6GW Dogger Bank windfarm.
